A Great Guide For Horse Enthusiast Who Wants To Learn How To Ride a Horse

For thousands of years, horses have played critical roles in human societies around the world. These equines helped early farmers plow their fields, transported people farther and faster, and gave warriors a competitive edge in battle. But experts have long puzzled over the deceptively simple question of where domestic horses actually came from.

It took a two-continent collaboration among over a hundred scientists to home in on the answer: southern Russia.

The discovery provides strong evidence that of three main locations in contention—Anatolia, Iberia, and western Eurasian steppes—the last is likely the birthplace of modern domestic horses, Equus caballus.

Study leader Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, and colleagues reconstructed ancient horse genomes from ancient horse skeletons found in sites ranging from Portugal to Mongolia.

One region in southern Russia, near the intersection of the Volga and Don Rivers, stood out. The cattle-herding region already had indirect archaeological evidence of horse domestication, but the new DNA research now shows that modern domestic horses can be traced to equines living here between 4,700 and 4,200 years ago.